Friday, February 15, 2008
AL Central Math
Good Friday morning everyone!! Well, two days in Orlando down, one and a half to go. Thank you to all of you for continuing to come to the site and especially to all of you who have left comments or sent me an e-mail.
Today, I wanted to do something a little bit different. I’ll be honest; this was a little exercise I did while on the plane on Tuesday. I thought it might be fun for some of you as well. I am (and maybe many of you are as well) frequently asked about where the Twins are in terms of the AL Central. So, I did a couple of things to try to measure that. I will show and try to explain what I did. But though my example, you can see how you can determine for yourself who the best team in the division is and where the Twins rank accordingly, at least in your mind.
Of course, this is a lot of opinion, but that is what preseason thoughts and predictions are all about anyway. So, let’s get to the fun (at least if you like baseball and math… a couple of things that just go hand in hand together).
The first thing I did was take a look at the lineups and staffs of the five AL Central teams. I tried to determine who the starter was at each position (C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, RF and DH), the likely top 5 starters for the team (SP1, SP2, SP3, SP4, SP5), the bullpen (BP – I just show one name that represents the team, but you will want to think beyond that name), and finally, the closer (CL). Here is what I came up with, of course, feel free to alter this list as you see appropriate:
| Chicago White Sox | Cleveland Indians | Detroit Tigers | Kansas City Royals | Minnesota Twins | |
| C | Pierzynski/Hall | Martinez/ Shoppach | Rodriguez/ Inge | Buck/ Olivo | Mauer/ Redmond |
| 1B | Paul Konerko | Ryan Garko | Carlos Guillen | Ross Gload | Justin Morneau |
| 2B | Richar/ Uribe | Asdrubal Cabrera | Placido Polanco | Mark Grudzielanek | Brendan Harris |
| 3B | Joe Crede | Casey Blake | Miguel Cabrera | Alex Gordon | Mike Lamb |
| SS | Orlando Cabrera | Jhonny Peralta | Edgar Renteria | Tony Pena | Adam Everett |
| LF | Josh Fields | Dellucci/ Francisco | J.Jones/ Thames | Mark Teahen | Delmon Young |
| CF | Nick Swisher | Grady Sizemore | Curtis Granderson | David DeJesus | Gomez/ Pridie |
| RF | Jermaine Dye | Franklyn Gutierrez | Magglio Ordonez | Jose Guillen | Michael Cuddyer |
| DH | Jim Thome | Travis Hafner | Gary Sheffield | Billy Butler | Jason Kubel |
| SP1 | Mark Buehrle | CC Sabathia | Justin Verlander | Gil Meche | Livan Hernandez |
| SP2 | Javier Vazquez | Fausto Carmona | Dontrelle Willis | Zach Greinke | Scott Baker |
| SP3 | Jose Contreras | Jake Westbrook | Jeremy Bonderman | Brian Bannister | Boof Bonser |
| SP4 | John Danks | Paul Byrd | Kenny Rogers | Yasohiko Yabuto | Kevin Slowey |
| SP5 | Gavin Floyd | Laffey/ Lee/ Sowers | Nate Robertson | Kyle Davies | Francisco Liriano |
| BP | Dotel/ Linebrink | Rafael Betancourt | Fernando Rodney | Ron Mahay | Pat Neshek |
| CL | Bobby Jenks | Joe Borowski | Todd Jones | Joakim Soria | Joe Nathan |
Next, you need to rank the players by their position. The chart below shows how I rank each player. You may agree or disagree in many cases. You may rank according to different criteria. Some my rank based on name recognition, past performance or projections for what the player could do in 2008. Try not to look ahead but do one position at a time. Some may take a lot of time to rank. Others of you may want to just go by gut, first reaction as that is what you generally believe to be true.
For reference, here is how my rankings were when I did this:
| Chicago White Sox | Cleveland Indians | Detroit Tigers | Kansas City Royals | Minnesota Twins | |
| C | 5 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 |
| 1B | 4 | 3 | 1 | 5 | 2 |
| 2B | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 3B | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| SS | 1 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 4 |
| LF | 3 | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 |
| CF | 3 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 5 |
| RF | 4 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 2 |
| DH | 2 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| SP1 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 5 |
| SP2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| SP3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| SP4 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 1 |
| SP5 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 1 |
| BP | 5 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| CL | 2 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 |
Finally, you will need to do some math. Add up your rankings for the Hitters and jot that down. Then add up the rankings of the Starting Pitchers and jot that down. Finally, add together the rankings of the Bullpen and the Closer. It should look something like this:
| Hitters | 32 | 27 | 18 | 32 | 26 |
| Starters | 19 | 8 | 12 | 20 | 16 |
| Relievers | 7 | 6 | 9 | 6 | 2 |
| Total | 58 | 41 | 39 | 58 | 44 |
Obviously the team with the lowest point total would be the highest ranking team for you. In my case, this would say that the Tigers should be the best team with Cleveland behind them. The Twins rank a close third while the White Sox and Royals will be competing for 4th place.
But how about weighting the totals a little bit? If half of the game is hitting and half of the game is pitching and defense, maybe we should look at this a little differently. So, I added a row for the Weighted Total. I came up with a formula that would take 1.2 times the Hitters number (remember that defense should, in some way, be a part of the hitter’s number – except in the case of the DH) PLUS 0.6 times the Starting pitcher (figuring many times the starter goes just six innings) PLUS 0.2 times the bullpen/closer. What does that show us?
| Hitters | 32 | 27 | 18 | 32 | 26 |
| Starters | 19 | 8 | 12 | 20 | 16 |
| Relievers | 7 | 6 | 9 | 6 | 2 |
| Total | 58 | 41 | 39 | 58 | 44 |
| Weighted | 51.2 | 38.4 | 30.6 | 51.6 | 41.2 |
This doesn’t change the order of the top three teams in the division, but in my case, it shows that the separation between Detroit (on paper, or at least on my piece of paper) and Cleveland might be bigger than we thought at first. This also differentiates the bottom two teams a little bit.
The last thing I wanted to do was find a percentage of the Weighted Total. So, I found the sum of that row, and then took each number as a percentage.
| Hitters | 32 | 27 | 18 | 32 | 26 |
| Starters | 19 | 8 | 12 | 20 | 16 |
| Relievers | 7 | 6 | 9 | 6 | 2 |
| Total | 58 | 41 | 39 | 58 | 44 |
| Weighted | 51.2 | 38.4 | 30.6 | 51.6 | 41.2 |
| Percentage | 24.0% | 18.0% | 14.4% | 24.2% | 19.3% |
| Chance | -20.2% | 9.9% | 28.2% | -21.1% | 3.3% |
What does this tell us? Well, in true math, if five teams each had a truly equal shot at winning the division title, each team would have a 20.0% chance, right? Well, this shows that, according to my rankings and weighting, the Tigers would actually be expected to have 28.2% better than average chance of being better than that average.
| Hitters | 32 | 27 | 18 | 32 | 26 |
| Starters | 19 | 8 | 12 | 20 | 16 |
| Relievers | 7 | 6 | 9 | 6 | 2 |
| Total | 58 | 41 | 39 | 58 | 44 |
| Weighted | 51.2 | 38.4 | 30.6 | 51.6 | 41.2 |
| Percentage | 24.0% | 18.0% | 14.4% | 24.2% | 19.3% |
| Chance | -20.2% | 9.9% | 28.2% | -21.1% | 3.3% |
| Wins | 65 | 89 | 104 | 64 | 84 |
This is just some Extra Innings footage, but if an average team should win 81 of the season’s 162 games, and the Tigers should be 28.2% better than that, they should win 104 games. The division standings at the end of the year would be:
Detroit Tigers 104-58
Cleveland Indians 89-73
Minnesota Twins 83-79
Chicago White Sox 65-97
Kansas City Royals 64-98
SUMMARY
Please take this for what it is. It’s just a fun exercise. Maybe you can you it for some sort of division predictor. Please remember that this projection makes a pretty big assumption that reality tells us we simply can not make. It assumes that these teams play only each other for the 162 game season. Obviously they play the rest of the American League plus their interleague schedule. So, unless there were a schedule where each of the Major League teams played each other an equal number of times AND we did this analysis for each of the 30 teams together, this would not be 100%
Again, that really was not the purpose of this. But if you have some time, think through this process and see where the AL Central teams rank against each other.
I would love to hear your thoughts on my rankings, this process or its results. Send an e-mail, or discuss below in the Comments. I will be flying home late on Saturday night, so I should be back and writing consistently by Monday!! Have a great weekend!